8 Channel Professional sound card

From: Mark (mark_ofuk_at_yahoo.co.uk)
Date: 10/02/04 

Date: 2 Oct 2004 10:41:28 -0700

Hi all,

Forgive me if this is an old question, but I am looking for a good
"professional quality" sound card that has 8+ channels of output and
DirectSound support.

When I say professional I mean one which gives a very high quality of
sound output (better than a sound blaster) the cost is not too much of
an issue as I am not on a budget.

I have been able to find lots of 8 channel professional cards that
claim to support DirectSound, but after doing more research I found
that these cards do not give the programmer direct access to the
hardware streaming buffers meaning that GetCaps() returns 0
HwMixingStreamingBuffers in the DSCAPS structure. They appear to
provide DirectSound support only via software mixing through kmixer.

The ideal solution would be a card which provides this as 4 separate
stereo pairs (reported as separate devices by DirectSoundEnumerate) of
unique channels although 1 8 channel device would be ok.

Ideally I am looking for an external device maybe USB (2?) or 1394,
but PCI would be ok…

Could anyone recommend such a card, or am I missing something here?

Thanks for any replies...

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